Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

European good will runs thin in the bad times – for good reason

The strikes spreading across Britain may look like a memorial to the spirit of the 1970s and 80s but they are a response to a quite different provocation: not the wage freeze or industrial relations reform of those earlier decades, but the current use of foreign companies and labour by British industry which has the effect of depriving British workers of employment. The "foreign" interests should not, of course, be regarded as interlopers at all in the terms of the EU to which we have signed up. The rules about free movement of capital and labour throughout the member states means that Italian suppliers (and their employees) have as much right to the business on offer by British companies as any indigenous outfit. Which was not all that objectionable when times were good and there was enough business (and employment) to keep everybody happy.

But as we all know, those days are gone – and with them goes the jolly spirit of communitaire share-the-wealth around, good will. Suddenly "British jobs for British workers" seems less like an unsavoury populist slogan and more like a desperate necessity. There are lots of people, most notably Gordon Brown, who are warning piously about the dangers of "beggar thy neighbour" self-interest on the part of countries (like Germany) whose interest in global cooperation – which is to say, bailing out its impoverished EU partners – seems suddenly to have diminished. But there is nothing invidious about this: it is the proper business of elected governments to put the interests of their own populations first at times of crisis. If they did not do that, then democratic accountability would mean very little. Which is precisely why the EU has attempted to do away with the democratic power of its individual member states. And now, the great contradiction at the heart of the European project is to be exposed. When it comes to a question of survival, voters will remember what the democratic process is supposed to be about and they will exercise their right to influence the national government that they have put in office. And who is to say they are wrong?